Wappani

Your first clue for finding out what wappani is.
Truly, I am the MS Paint artist of the age!

Type  "wappani" into Google and you will find all manner of highly informative information -- on a native American tribe called the Wappinger. (They lived from Manhattan through Poughkeepsie, by the way. They merged with other native peoples after they and the Dutch spent some time beating the tar out of each other.)

But wappani -- no matter what your search engine may try to tell you -- has nothing to do with North American peoples, (though when you know what it is, you can't help but think it ought to be).

It's actually a Japanese dish, and it's spelled like this わっぱ煮. You'll find it's associated with the island of Awashima (kanji thusly: 粟島), part of Niigata Prefecture (aka Niigata ken or 新潟県).

And now, ¡te presento una mapa con la isla de Awashima! (Yes, I know this isn't Things on Latin America/Spain. I just don't get a lot of opportunities to show off my beginner's Spanish. Can't fault me that much, can you? ;) )







So, our geographical context is in place. Time to tell you what wappani is. It is, more or less, this:

First, take a special flat-bottomed bowl made of cedar (aka the wappa, aka わっぱ . You have no idea how much I want to think up a wappa/Whopper joke right now). Put your soup ingredients in it, including things like miso, onion and cooked fish.

Next, locate a few (and this is important) heat-resistant rocks (we're talking basalt (aka genbugan/玄武岩) here. Don't nobody wanna dodge kitchen shrapnel, 's all I'm sayin'.) Heat them in a well made fire of some kind until they're so hot that they scare you. Pour hot water into your bowl.

Take up your pair of fire resistant tongs, pick up one of your hot rocks, dip it in a conveniently placed bowl of water, and insert it into your wappa. If you've done it right, the water will instantly begin (and continue for a short time) to boil extremely well -- the 煮 part of wappani.

When it stops boiling as much, repeat the rock dipping and inserting process, until you are satisfied. (I actually don't know why the people in the videos I looked at put new hot rocks in the wappa. The soup looked pretty heated up to me with just the first rock. Trade secrets, perhaps, or unobservant blogger.)

Voila, wappani! Basically a ancient/tribal/survivalist version of making your own phyllo/puff pastry/lutefisk. In a way needlessly complicated, but interesting, kind of impressive and possibly worth doing one time, if you're in the mood for it.

Here's one of the videos I looked at:

A variation on the heating process involves putting the rock in before the water, and adding in more than one rock, as you can see in this video:

I'm sure the ancient Awashima inhabitants also had their fine wire strainers to get the foam off the top of the bowls. ;)

And there's more. The video below (dated May 2010) shows what looks like some kind of first annual festival. Be warned: lots of Japanese folksy (and even at one point jazz/bluesy) music  and lots of people being silly for the camera -- dancing, singing, saying that the wappani is delicious ("umai!" and "uma'!"), and having exaggerated reactions of bliss while eating it. (Of course, if wappani takes a long time to make, they may have just been really hungry.) Those feeling dignified and/or find their eyes (and soul) twitching at the sound of goofy or twangy music, this may be a little hard to watch.

 Might be fun to go to though. ;)

References:

From Wappinger to wappani.

The Free Dictionary: Wappinger

NHK: みちしる:粟島のわっぱ煮漁師たちの豪快な郷土料理 <-- Had to guess out a way to put the title together on this one, just an FYI to the bibliographers out there.

粟島浦村: 粟島食の特産品


(Only three this time, amazing!) Also, the middle reference has an interesting video that I would have liked to embed here, but alas.)